What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (8 page)

Sally did not adhere to any rule from the above list. She never ate or slept or moved when Emma and I did. She was not constitutionally capable of noticing what anyone
around her wanted or needed. She fought with every person with whom she came in contact, in hotels and train stations, in cabs and museums. We spent the entire two-week trip apologizing for her.

But we had high hopes when we landed in London, where we would pass a few days warming up for New Year’s Eve in Paris. We spent those days primarily just trying to get Sally out of bed. She had awful jetlag, but insisted on going without the sleeping aids Emma and I popped until she had tossed and turned for several hours … which meant that she was taking an eight-hour sleeping pill just before Emma and I were waking up. After giving her a couple of hours while we got dressed and ate breakfast, we would try to quietly leave her to sleep. But she would wake up and insist on coming with us just as we were ready to slip out the door. So we would take off our coats and get comfortable while Sally ran a nice long bath, and our days would get started in the early afternoon.

One night, a couple of hours after Sally woke up, we went out to dinner in Soho to a Thai restaurant that sat parties at communal tables. We were seated with a group of six people from Mauritius, which, it turns out, is an island nation in the Indian Ocean, about twelve hundred miles east of Africa. The country is a mix of Indian, African, and French descendants, and if this little table of gorgeously colored people was any indication, the mix is a good one. They were all twenty- and thirtysomething, and most of them were “barristers” in London. Isn’t it funny how when people tell you they’re a “lawyer” it’s super boring, but when they tell you they’re a “barrister” it feels like
you’re meeting Colin Firth? As John Travolta said, “It’s the little differences.”

One of the female barristers was there with her younger brother, a pretty, twenty-year-old, effete fashion-industry type who was living in New York City. We all made friends over dinner, and I made eyes with one particularly handsome, dark-eyed twenty-four-year-old named Nicolas, who said he wanted his picture taken kissing my cheek. I thought that was a great idea. After dinner, he invited us to come dancing with them.

Nicolas suggested a club nearby that he said had a fantastic DJ, and which he said was mixed—both gay and straight. That sounded perfect since we were so clearly a mixed group—or, at least, a group of straight people with the one obviously gay young brother from New York. So our new posse of nine spilled down the wet streets arm in arm and piled into the club, which was filled with rainbow disco lights; mirrored floors, ceilings, and walls; and exclusively tan, waxed, shirtless men whose thongs were showing above their white jeans. This club was as “mixed” as the Village People. But the DJ was indeed fantastic, and so I grabbed my barrister and hit the dance floor.

The nice thing about a gay club is there is no possible way to be the sluttiest person in the room. Nicolas was a hell of a dancer, and our bodies were moving really well, and really close. It didn’t take long for some kissing and groping to spring out of this fertile soil. He tasted like orange-vanilla lollipop, and it was all pretty sexy. If there is one thing that is my favorite thing in the world, it’s making out on a dance floor. Of course, it’s not always the most
ladylike thing to be caught doing. I have more pictures from college than I’d like of me, twenty pounds heavier, in some nice Midwestern boy’s arms, looking caught and squinty-eyed, lipstick smeared across my round, stuffed-pizza-stuffed cheeks, maybe a nipple or two accidentally poking out over the strapless dress I’d borrowed from my thinner roommate … So, not the classiest. But here in this gay club in London, squeezed in between about a thousand men with their hands on each other’s Disneylands (happiest places on earth), I could quietly hump this stranger’s leg and still come across like one of the daughters from
Downton Abbey.

I found more evidence of my relative sense of decorum when I went to the bathroom, and had to squirm my way through the sea of humping men. It reminded me of when I was a kid and we would go play in the waves at night when the grunion were running. We’d scream as we ran across the sand covered with millions of slimy, squirming, mating fish, slithering all over each other and our toes … Crossing this dance floor was like that, but with more boners and bronzer.

Anyway, I made it to the women’s bathroom to find that the door had two signs on it: one that read
WOMEN
, and a second that clarified
WOMEN ONLY ALLOWED IN WOMEN
’
S RESTROOM!!!
NO MEN!!!
Once I pushed that door open, which was difficult due to the fact that the room was filled wall to wall with men, I found two stalls with signs of their own on the doors:
ONE PERSON AT A TIME IN STALL!!!
Each stall had two to four sets of male feet inside.

I managed to beg my way to a moment with a toilet,
and peed amongst the smell of cocaine and sounds of coupling/throupling, then made my way back to Emma and Sally, who sat with our Mauritian friends. Nicolas and Raj, the young gay New Yorker, talked to two older white-haired-and-jeaned gentlemen nearby, while Raj’s older sister, Leoni, watched in amusement.

“Poor Raj,” she said. “These guys won’t leave him alone. And that one could be his father.”

Raj was whispering into the older man’s ear, and smiling. Whatever he was saying was making the old man smile, too.

One of the Mauritians leaned over to Raj’s sister: “Leoni, I don’t think he minds.”

Leoni looked confused, and turned back to watch her brother, an idea slowly dawning. And that’s when we understood that not only did she not know her brother was gay, which was sort of like not noticing he had two arms and two legs, but the entire reason we were here tonight was so that her friends could help him come out via the fascinating approach of making out with old men in front of his sister. We had stumbled into a Mauritian coming-out party.

Leoni started rocking back and forth, trying to self-soothe by saying things like, “I’m in the ocean surrounded by dolphins, I’m in the ocean surrounded by dolphins,” as she threw back her margarita and watched her brother grind on the hot, tan grandpa.

We whispered among ourselves how incredible it was that she hadn’t seen that this obviously gay boy was gay as he and my date got pawed by the silver-haired men. I got
up to grab Nicolas, who had been ignoring me completely while he was wing-manning for his friend … really well.
Like, he didn’t seem to mind it at all, actually.
And then I realized that I, too, was not noticing that someone had two arms and two legs.

I slept next to Emma that night.

Sally, though, brought home a barrister. They got a second room for the two hours we had before we needed to wake up to catch our train to Paris, and Sally stumbled into our room to pack one hour and fifty minutes later. Realizing she had lost an earring in the other, now vacated, room, she called the front desk demanding to be let back in. But the room was under the barrister’s name, who had already left.

“You guys, what was that guy’s name?” she called to us irritably, still on the phone with the front desk.

We, too, did not know the name of the man with whom she had just had sex, so she yelled at the front desk for a few more minutes. “So I don’t know his name! You saw me come in two hours ago with that guy, you know I was with him in his room, just let me in!” She was clearly much more attached to this earring than she was to her dignity.

N
ow, let’s not get distracted by my sexy night with the gay Mauritian. I was in Europe because I invited myself on a trip across oceans so that I could have a wildly romantic New Year’s with the man of my dreams. The man who, even if we hadn’t fallen in love
yet
, after months of knowing each other, was still ensconced in my little head as my best
hope for finding someone who would make me want what everyone else in the world seemed to want. This is a lot of pressure. And that pressure built up mostly about two inches below my left eye, on my cheekbone, in the form of an enormous, painful, tumorlike pimple. The kind of pimple that even Emma and Sally had to admit was the kind that makes you skip prom, the kind that stars in a Stridex commercial.

Our first night out in Paris, I carefully put spackle on my face, trying my best to look less like an awkward teenager, and we went to our first Ferris-organized dinner.

I’ve now shared a hundred group dinners with Ferris, and they always go the same way. He introduces everyone, making every member of the party sound like the most incredible person in the world. He does all of the ordering while everyone gabs. He’s a perfect orderer. The tables are boisterous, people feed one another from communal plates, there are often performances of the singing or trick-performing or toast-making variety, attractive strangers at adjacent tables are usually brought over to join the party, and the waiters or chefs or restaurant owners often end up sitting with us, sharing a bottle of wine and handing over their phone number to Ferris so he’ll invite them to his next party. It’s magical. And as the person who normally takes responsibility for the success of any given dinner party, I am always both impressed and vaguely displaced.

Ferris is better at what I’m great at.

So we walked into the private room that held this first dinner, excited to see what Ferris had cooked up. It turned out that Ferris had flown to Paris from Berlin, where he
had seen a beautiful blond stranger in the terminal. She was in talks to be the next Bond girl, and had a part in the next Batman movie. She was that kind of blond girl. On the plane, he was in business class and she was in coach, and so he ran champagne and warm nuts back to her during the flight and discovered she would be staying with some model friends just a couple of blocks from his brother’s cathedral! So lucky! So she and some Latvian models were now part of our party. And were the center of attention. I didn’t need to worry about my pimple being noticed … or any of the rest of me.

“God bless how many beautiful women Ferris always rounds up,” one male guest said to me, not implying I was one of them.

Now, despite my focus on Ferris, it was also impossible not to notice how many other attractive, funny, single men were in this group. The seeds of many crushes I would have over the next few years were planted on this trip. But what I didn’t understand yet was that few of these guys were available to me, really.

They were all Peter Pans, and, as I had yet to accept that I was a Pietra Pan myself, I didn’t see it. Over the years, more than one of them would eventually give me some speech that added up to the notion that I was “not one to be trifled with.” That you didn’t kiss someone like me if you didn’t want to marry her, and that was far, far too scary a proposition. This “compliment” frustrated me many a night, in the face of chemistry with one friend or another who just wouldn’t kiss me.